Posted on 08/08/2007 3:28:55 PM PDT by Jewels1091
A week after a deadly bridge collapse, U.S. Navy divers cut through tangled debris with underwater torches and saws on Wednesday in the search for victims while investigators identified a possible flaw in the 40-year-old span's design.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Nobody here fell for it. We are simply waiting for the reports detailing how the main members were weakened with acid.
It’s had a giant monkey climb to the top, and it’s been hit by an airplane, and there was hardly any damage. I think it will be around for centuries.
There was a SC-bomber thread from a couple days back where knees were jerking like crazy. Not with regard to the possible terrorist connection, mind you, but with regard to the FBI.
Yes, Bush’s design is a failure.
Life isn't perfect so why should bridges be expected to be perfect?
Hey, somebody hires the engineers graduating with a 2.0 GPA!
It can be done. Not cheaply (depending on the construction), maybe . . . but it can be done.
Everyone on the thread at that time seemed to believe we'd find out these guys had one or more bombs AND had Arab names.
Turns out they had more than one bomb AND had Arab names.
The way the cops withheld information told everyone what the case was.
The FBI came in later, right?
Bush’s fault; tax cuts fault; not enough money for roads, bridges rebuilding; it is a plot to RAISE TAXES to blame tax cuts. They are now pushing for a rise in gas taxes nation wide. Rush spoke long about this today and some fund that was suppose to be set up with certain taxes to do all this, but the libs spent it on social programs, just like they did SS.
My tinfoil hat wearing little brother, who lives in Minnesota called me today to tell me he thinks the republican governor Pawlenty took the bridge down on purpose so that the feds would come in and build a new one at no cost to Minnesotans. I almost hung up on him and told him to quit smoking so much pot as it clearly has fried his brains.
A good number of comments on the thread read as if the word "known" did not exist in the headline. But the inclusion or exclusion of the word makes a huge difference, especially since it was the day after the arrests.
Exactly.
That's ridiculous. Only Christine Gregoire in Washington State is that corrupt. :-)
Psst. I'll give you one of my patents, gratis.
It's a carbon fiber structural paint.
By the time those buildings wear out the internal steel, you'll be able to just paint it on and forms a hard candy shell!
(Cut me on 10% of the savings, willya?)
“National Transportation Safety Board investigators said they had found a potential design problem with gusset plates, or steel plates that tie together angled steel beams of the bridge’s frame.”
A couple FRpers speculated on these very plates in the big thread
It cannot be fixed by September, 2008, in time for the Republican Convention?????? And entire freeway span was fixed in Los Angeles in a couple of months. hmmmmm. The Army could have made it happen/ across the Rhein / in a few days.
That's a good question, and something I've wondered about before too. Controlled demolition can work some miracles, but still, there's limits on how small a footprint they can drop something like oh, the Sears Tower in Chicago into.
If you can't go ahead and clear everything within a half a block or so... it's all going to have to go down through the elevators one bite at a time. It would be slow and expensive.
At the moment almost every politician in America is slightly more honest and forthright than Christine.
[snort]
Quite. Except for the ones she would have taken home and eaten.
The essense of engineering is to build the structure with just enough more strength in it than the greatest stress that shall ever applied to it. Unfortunately, none of us are sufficiently prescient enough to realize that the greatest stresses are often in some manner or effect beyond what can be imagined.
The Brooklyn Bridge was vastly overengineered and overbuilt, when the sheer brute strength of massive steel was counted to stand up well enough to any stress known at the time. And given that the materials available at the time were in many ways inferior to the best available today, that strategy worked well.
But engineers work under the gun from the bean counters too, as seen in high-dollar manufacture and construction of some of the modern machinery of life. “Make it a little cheaper” is the mantra in any number of engineering firms, while trying to emphasize that the cheaper design equals or exceeds to original specifications. But not by too much.
Suppose, say, that someone endeavored to construct a bridge using carbon fibers. Light, strong, and relatively resistant to the woes of vibration, weathering and oxidation. But an absolute bear to fabricate, and with the intricacies of design that are part of a bridge design, probably so prohibitively expensive to scale up that it would not get beyond model construction stage.
The fact is, that the design flaws in a highly engineered structure may not show for YEARS, or even never, if the excessive stress just never takes place. The design flaw of the World Trade Center, for example, was that when its internal steel supporting structure is heated above a certain temperature, it would collapse down upon itself. And this was because of a circumstance that nobody had imagined, that the burst tanks of a nearly fully fueled up jetliner would support a hot enough flame to cause the vertical members of the framework to be heated to the point where the steel became plastic and unable to support the weight of the floors above. The original design of the WTC allowed for the fact that a simple impact of the structure by an airliner traveling at 400 MPH could be absorbed by the building’s design, without compromising the integrity of the structure. But it did not allow for a subsequent fire in which temperatures would reach 2,700 degrees, causing the collapse.
The explosion that occurred in the basement of the WTC in 1993, while it caused a considerable amount of damage in the immediate vicinity, proved the original design concept was correct. The stress applied did not exceed the design limits. Conclusion, the engineers had built well. And the structure was still a splendid example of design superiority as of September 10, 2001.
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